Co-winner of the Tupelo Press Editor's Prize and a ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book of the Year finalist, this is a collection of richly-imagined poems that quite literally recreates the art form. Poem after poem dazzles with smart, funny, sensous, images and feelings. Polyphonic and gymnastic, these poems are jewels for the tongue, the eye, the mind.

Ten original essays by advanced scholars and well-published poets address the middle generation of American poets, including the familiar---Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman---and various important contemporaries: Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, and Lorine Niedecker. This was a famously troubled cohort of writers, for reasons both personal and cultural, and collectively their poems give us powerful, moving insights into American social life in the transforming decades of the 1940s through the 1960s.In addition to having worked during the broad middle of the last century, these poets constitute the center of twentieth-century American poetry in the larger sense, refuting invidious connotations of “middle” as coming after the great moderns and being superseded by a proliferating postmodern experimentation. This middle generation mediates the so-called American century and its prodigious body of poetry, even as it complicates historical and aesthetic categorizations.Taking diverse formal and thematic angles on these poets---biographical-historical, deconstructionist, and more formalist accounts---this book re-examines their between-ness and ambivalence: their various positionings and repositionings in aesthetic, political, and personal matters. The essays study the interplay between these writers and such shifting formations as religious discourse, consumerism, militarism and war, the ideology of America as “nature's nation,” and U.S. race relations and ethnic conflicts. Reading the Middle Generation Anew also shows the legacy of the middle generation, the ways in which their lives and writings continue to be a shaping force in American poetry. This fresh and invigorating collection will be of great interest to literary scholars and poets.

There are many voices within these poems, each distinct and accessible, all of them subversive and disarmingly personal. This nimble poet deftly lures readers to his penetrating observations by not being afraid to open his own emotional veins; he often leads the way with a torch lit by his own pain. Yet his beguiling humor paradoxically occupies the same space as his deepest grief, bringing honest perspective and insight to the most sorrowful circumstance. --Tupelo Press.

Poetry. Combining various mediums to depict and illuminate a unique vision that she experienced while visiting an archaeological excavation many years ago, England has rewritten the rules and fashioned a surprising collection. Drawings and photographs entwine with her poetry and prose to demonstrate how the fragments and rubble of history goad the imagination into picturing an original and newly created whole.

The Deshima Diaries provide invaluable daily information on social and economic life in Tokugawa Japan in the early years of the Sakoku period.